The Percy Jackson Movie Sucks in the 21st Century

Maybe in a different century, they will either be lucky or just less fortunate to watch this.

Hi, I'm hardcopy, and I still read young adult novels like it's none of your business.

The first time I saw the Percy Jackson trailer was in a theatre with one of my friends, who is a huge fan of the book series Percy Jackson and the Olympians. When the very first few seconds of this trailer played, he was curled up in his seat saying, "Holy shit, I have to watch this." 

He explained the series to me, and how the plot is a modern day Greek mythology, which really interests me.  I gave it time before reading the book, which was just before the movie's release.  I don't take a lot of time to read detailed books like this, but I think I'm safe to say that I took my time to enjoy the series regardless.  Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to read any of the other books before I saw the movie, but if I did, I could have seen how much more shitty the film really was.  Here's a list of the books and basically what happens:

Book One: Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson Steals No One's Thunder because Luke Took the Master Bolt)
Book Two: Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson Uses his Son of Poseidon Powers to Rape the Ocean)
Book Three: The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson has Competition with Zeus' Daughter just for No Reason and Someone not Important to the Plot Dies)
Book Four: Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson goes Through a Maze and Lots of Shit Happens while Kronos' Body gets Restored)
Book Five: The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson Doesn't Save the Day)
Book ?: The Lost Hero (...whatever the hell happens here in some title form)

As you can tell, I didn't read this book.  From what I researched, it is technically part of the series as the sixth book, but I really don't like to count it because Percy Jackson's name isn't in the title anywhere.  So far I found out that this is a different set of heroes under a different prophecy, and Annabeth shows up pissed that she can't find Percy.  I'm going to assume he went missing, and yeah that's really all I know.  I will get around to reading this soon when it's not exactly flying off the shelves. 

Now what does any of this have to do with the movie at all?  Before I get there, I would just like to remind you of the major points that the first book had:

• Set under the prophecy that one of the offspring of the Big Three (Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades) will be responsible for the downfall or safety of Olympus.
• Luke, a son of Hermes', betrays the Olympians and heroes (demi gods) to bring back Kronos
• He gets away at the end
• Percy can't fly in the air because he could get killed by Zeus, who pretty much hates him.  (Luke gives him flying shoes that Grover ends up using.)
• Grover is a pansy looking for Pan as his personal quest.
• Annabeth's hair is blonde.
• The three different monsters during the quest were Medusa, a chimera in St. Louis, and that stretcher guy in some furniture place. 

Now here's the list of events that happened in the movie:

• Set under the prophecy that one of the offspring of the Big Three will be responsible for the downfall or safety of Olympus.
• Luke betrays the Olympians and heroes to bring back Kronos
• He gets his ass handed to him by Percy on top of New York buildings
• Percy flies with these shoes that Luke gives him
• He has a shield that he shouldn't get until the second book (Tyson, his half brother, makes it for him)
• Grover is a bad ass trying to get his horns back.
• Annabeth is a redhead.
• Monsters: Medusa, and a Hydra in DC.  I think there was one more, but I forgot.  It gets all fuzzy after watching that scene in the hotel.

It's really hard to say exactly where the movie screwed up.  I know just as much as anyone else that movies based on books have a fair 50/50 chance of being completely awful, but I didn't think it would be this terrible.  I have seen Japanese live actions that don't even follow any of the original manga except for characters and basic storyline and can still be a great series, sometimes better than the original material it was based on. 

A good example to compare this movie to is the Harry Potter series.  Fans of the book find some of the movies to be good yet lacking in important story lines that the director takes out.  From what I heard the most accurate was the recent Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1.  Harry Potter books are entirely different than Percy Jackson ones.  First of all, if I put at least three HP books together in a stack, I could bench those things.  Percy Jackson's thickest book is the fifth, and it's not even as big as the first HP book.  So the director has no freaking choice.  And you know what else is funny?  The director was Chris Columbus, the director from the first few HP movies. 

Bottom line this is how it comes out visually.  Let's say in example 1 in the graph below, the solid black line is any Harry Potter book representing the storyline.  The red curve is the movie's storyline.  Notice how it touches the ends but also curves out.  So if I were to interpret this, this means that the movie started and ended the same for the most part, and towards the beginning there was less of a gap between similarities versus the ending.  Understandable. 

Now look at the Percy Jackson example.  Yeah that's basically what the movie was.  Barely anything followed like it was supposed to.  It ended with Percy defeating Luke during their fight, and that surprises me because if at the time I was thinking if they planned on doing a sequel, they would have pulled the "he survived" anyway bullshit. 

But guess what.  They are making a sequel.  So with all the stuff that happened in this first movie, it's going to be screwed with because the director mixed up a lot of scenes from the other books including some scenes that weren't meant to happen in any book anywhere. 

In a way the movie was funny but not definately what I was expecting.